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ok , once i upgrade to this version i'll give it a shot again, and yes that is what i like to due as for tuning the volume levels manually. kevin

ok rivers's
after playing around last night with arctan i now realize why it is that i enjoy slice so much more. arctan tends to make the center channel a predominate/discrete channel, and i am not a big fan of the center channel, my taste leans more toward the old school quadraphonics of the 70's. i do however love the Lfe, sometimes maybe a tad too much, but to me the center channel just kind of mucks up the front stereo field, that is why i love slice, it mixes more like the old school quads, where i can drop the gain in the center well below FR and FL and not lose vital material. i do like the center channel for movies however, and i know that most upmixers dig arctan because of the center channel, it is kinda cool especially with some material utilizing the across setting it will often steer your vocals into center, but to my ear it just sounds odd, sort of the way most of the doors perception set was mastered, where morrison is firmly planted in the center, i don't know that's just me, i am still running with spec 4.3 though but i doubt there is that great a change in the arctan steering from last update. so please, please ,please never get rid of slice. i will play with it again after i update, oh quick question for you guys... when i update to 4.8 will i lose all of my current saved projects? i think last update i was not sure so i finished all of my running projects before i updated. anyways thanks again for all you do. kevin

Not a "river" but I'll chime in as the author of SPEC ;0)

No you will not lose you oldr projects. At least not jumping from 4.3 all the way to 4.8 (at a certain point I started using version numbers for all the plugins, so you could always go back, perhaps with 4.6?). there might have been an issue with 4.3 to 4.4, or 4.5.

Yes, a lot of like the "wow factor" of having different sounds comming from different channels, and that includes vocals in the center. However, the way I would characterise ArcTan vs. Slice is ArcTan gives you a smooth continuous sound field across all channels whereas slice gives you discrete chunks of sound only in each of the channels.

You can reduce the ammount of information in the cetner channel, in ArcTan, by reducing the center width, including turning it all the way off by setting the center width to zero.

Just occured to me to ask; is your center channel the same type/model of speaker as the rest of your speakers?

very interesting, center width lowering, thank you ,i will check that out. and no my center ch on all of my listening equipments' ie; car and home are both smaller and not full range, in my car it is close to full range but considerably smaller. i run with 4 full range equal load speakers in both places, (fl,fr,rl,rr ) with a small sub at home , because i don't need much there. but in my car the sub is ugly big and ugly powerful. kevin

For music surround all speakers would ideally be the same. I too have a different center in the car but I have it crossed over to the sub at the same point as the others.

With different speakers one complication is bass management. You may have set all your speakers to "small", even if they are not, to allow you to program the correct crossover point to the sub.

I recently started experimenting with SPEC.I need to completely separate some channels but no matter how i try it with adjacent,blend and width settings i can't remove drums from the center channel,do i have to keep experimenting till i find it,or is there another way?Thanks in advance and sorry if my question is way too noobish.

Adjacent Speaker and Blend controls are about adding sounds back in. Those are used when you "artifacts" or things that don't sound natural. Using those controls judiciously makes the sound natural without much penalty in separation.

The width controls let you control how the stereo field is divided between the 5 speakers, but if the producer put dums in both stereo channels, no amount of width control adjustment will remove the drums from the center

Controls that would add to the separation would be the channel subtraction controls in ArcTan. However the way I have them setup now they only affect the Fronts and Rears, because that is where we are usually trying to remove sounds.

They are set up so that you could remove a sound in the fronts or rears that is also in the center. I think that's the opposite of what you want.

I could probably make a special test layout for you however.

It would be really nice,as i'm trying to have the pure melody synths only on the center channel(I'm planing to do the same with vocals in the future with other tracks).Thank you anyway.

I'm on the west coast of the USA. I'll take a look this evening.